In general, when a novice driver or a driver who is poor at parking parks a vehicle in a narrow space, the driver may fail to accurately predict distances to other vehicles parked on the front and rear or both sides of a target parking space, and thus may park the vehicle by driving the vehicle forward or backward several times.
When the distance to a nearby vehicle is predicted inaccurately, a minor collision with the parked vehicle may occur or a vehicle door may not be opened normally since the distance to the nearby vehicle is small. In particular, since it is very difficult to secure visibility through a side-view mirror or a rear-view mirror at night compared to the daytime, parking at night may be more difficult.
To solve these problems, a parking assist system may generate a parking trajectory on the basis of information collected from various sensors, and locate the vehicle in a desired space while following the corresponding trajectory.
After searching for a plurality of empty parking sections (where no other vehicles are parked), a conventional parking assist system may not provide a driver with an image (image obtained by predicting a state in which the vehicle is parked) of a target parking space within each parking section, and thus it may be difficult for the driver to select an optimal empty parking section from among the plurality of empty parking sections.
In other words, the conventional parking assist system may not provide the driver with the image of the target parking space within each parking section, thereby failing to allow the driver to select the optimal parking section.